Concretene, biogas into graphene
Concretene is developing a way to make graphene from wastewater biogas for use in a concrete additive. The company, based in Manchester, announced in late October that it has raised £4.5 million.
The company's own news item calls this the first close of its Series A. The Construction Index describes it as scale-up funding. £2 million comes from NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance, managed by PXN Ventures as part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II. Existing backers LocalGlobe and Molten Ventures also invested. LocalGlobe backed Concretene in 2022. CEO Mike Harrison describes the £2 million as backing from British Business Bank through PXN.
The Construction Index and BusinessCloud both describe Concretene as a spin-out of The University of Manchester. The day-to-day link is the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre. According to the centre's case study, Concretene was developed in collaboration with the centre, part of The University of Manchester, and its engineers developed the graphene-enhanced additive with construction specialists. Concretene's address is the same building.
The production plan is a circular programme with technology partner Levidian, using wastewater biogas from United Utilities as the feedstock. According to the company, in laboratory and previous scaled trials the additive showed the potential to remove 10 to 20% of the cement from commonly used mixes with no impact on strength, durability, batching or placement, and it is designed to be cost-neutral at scale.
What the money pays for: industrial-scale manufacturing of the additive, scaled concrete trials with industrial partners and development of the Manchester graphene programme. Harrison says: "This round takes us from the lab to multi-tonne manufacturing."